Against The Common Good: A Review of Tomasky, Pt. 1
Tue May 09, 2006 at 10:39:23 PM PDT
For a piece the aim of which is to pull all us Democrats together, Tomasky's essay in the American Prospect is an untidy bundle. He takes a few potshots at multi-culturalism, re-tells the history of the twentieth century Democratic Party as the story of why his big framing idea is the one that works, and clutches to his breast cherished ideas of patriotism, self-sacrifice and community-spirit only a real ogre would cavil at.
People on DKos have been writing about this essay like it's the second coming. To me, it's straight from the paint-by-numbers of school of Democratic Party ideology. It's the remarketing of rhetoric we've all heard before. It's really very tired. And it leads straight to electoral Dukakisville.
Probably the most frequent mistake of sub-par political thinkers is the unspoken assumption that politics is a world unto itself, where parties and candidates win and lose based on their quality of their arguments and the efficacy of their policies and that's that. But if Marx was right about anything, it is that economics shapes politics and culture, and our analysis of the political begins with an understanding of the material circumstances that undergird people's lives.
Tomasky's basic point is that the Democrats did well back in the day when they appealed to a notion of the common good and individual self-sacrifice for its sake, and did poorly when the party strayed from that ideology. For the moment, let's pretend this is true. If so, the "common good" ideology did well in an America in which working for the WPA to keep one's family from starving, and being sent by Uncle Sam overseas to be shot at by fascists, was as universal a cultural experience as seeing "Star Wars" and "ET" is for ours.
For the Democrats who came of age in the turmoil of the unprecedentedly nasty first half of the twentieth century, sacrifice to save the democratic political order and sacrifice to win economic opportunity was desirable because the consequences of the alternative were pretty readily visible. But Americans born to the culture of affluence, and to the expectation of ever-greater affluence, experience the world in the terms most evocatively phrased by the band Dire Straits: "money for nothing, and the chicks for free." Even if it is for no other reason than the exposure of the Baby Boomers and their progeny to saturation mass-media advertising, the average voter has come to expect that they will receive what they want with minimal effort. It's sad, yes. Horrible, yes. A stain on the sacrifice of all those on whose shoulders we stand, or more aptly, sit, in our lay-z-boys, yes. But it is also true.
So for Tomasky to say basically, "You Democrats have erred by arguing for a balkanized model of individual ideas of the good instead of the welfare of the community", really ignores the context of what happened to the country itself between the years 1950 and 2000. And more to the point, it ignores the evolution of the rhetoric of the Republican Party during this same period. Tomasky makes it out as if as the Democrats evolved from the party of the community to the party of special interests while the Republican held to that high ground of the common welfare.
Well, I have eleven words for Tomasky on this point: "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?" The Republicans during the Reagan ascendancy honed the art of the political appeal to voters' immediate self-interest, promising to put money back in workers' paychecks, to keep a wasteful government from spending "your" money on "them", to prevent affirmative action from advancing Black workers at the expensive of whites, and the list goes on. It goes without saying these appeals were largely mystifications. But what they connected to so powerfully was not a desire for communal well-being. It was voters' personal aspirations.
Concomittantly, I think an exploration of the speeches of the Democratic foils of 80's Republicanism, Mondale and Dukakis, would actually find--not the crass appeals to special interests that Tomasky's theory of the Democrats' decline would really require that one find--but instead just the type of hearkening back to the common good of the New Deal/Fair Deal/Great Society that Tomasky calls for Democrats to start doing now.
Tomasky also basically thinks Clinton succeeded in 1992 by making just this kind of argument for the common good over the individual. Once again this runs into the problem of the actual history: Clinton won in the context of lingering economic weakness by promising to stimulate the economy, chiefly by means of his infamously unenacted proposal of a middle-class tax cut. In short, even though he subsequently chose to govern otherwise, Clinton won in 1992 by running on the most important issues of the election as a candidate of individual aspirations (jobs, tax cut), and not of the common good (deficit reduction). Candidates championing responsibility, sacrifice and the public welfare that year included Paul Tsongas, Jerry Brown, and Ross Perot. Each had their virtues, their vices, and in some cases their spectactularly bugfuck paranoias. But they each prioritized the national wellbeing over the individual and had their asses kicked by Clinton, each in his own turn, for his trouble.
I want to conclude this criticism of Tomasky by challenging a bit of the Daily Kos conventional wisdom. Now, I believe in patriotism and heroism and sacrifice. I believe it is appropriate to challenge people to be better than their basest impulses. And I believe we have to reverse the demise of social virtues like solidarity, cooperation, and charity.
But, come on, people! America is about looking out for number one! And wanting that to change doesn't make it change, and pretending it's not so is not the way to win elections.
The best political philosophers--Bernard Mandeville, Adam Smith, Karl Marx and in his own way, Sigmund Freud--use different explanations to describe what is essentially the same phenomenon. When individuals imagine what is good for the nation of which they are a part, they typically imagine what is good for themselves. They think of the nation as an extension of themselves. And when they say they decide what is good for the nation they are really deciding what they think is good for themselves. People vote what they think is their individual self-interest, even when they call it otherwise.
And in whatever pure golden age of nobility and sacrifice we imagine existed before the time when Donald Trump and Paris Hilton became the officially designated icons of all that we could ever hope to be, if we look hard enough we see that political choices in those eras were also made by calculations of personal benefit. Americans in the Depression were given the choice of the Party-That-Will-Let--You-Starve and the Party-That-Will-Let-You-Work-For-Your-Supper. Despite Tomasky's reasoning, they chose the latter not because of the work part, but because of the realistic promise of survival.
What we must escape is the ideological assumption that voters voting self-interest is an inherently right-wing phenomenon. If that's the case, then progressivism would face a task that's truly Sisyphean.
But it's not. We think this merely because the right has become so expert at manipulating individuals' ideas of self-interest whereas we've become so inept. John Kerry's rhetoric in 2004, for instance, was filled with the New Frontier rhetoric of public service that makes Tomasky goes weak in the knees, but try to find in his policy proposals a promise to make the lives of ordinary working voters better as attractive and visceral as the Republican trope of "putting the money you earned back in your paycheck."
Pretending we don't have to appeal to voters' immediate self-interest, pretending we can strategize our way around it, only insures that in the end we will repeat the same failures we are trying to avoid.
If we run on affordable health care, accessible college education, the minimum wage, job protection from offshoring, tax fairness to make big business and the rich pay their fair share, and an energy plan that brings down costs for the average American, and hammer relentlessly the effects our ideas would have on the lives of ordinary Americans so that the implicit message of every single advertising dollar is "This is how this program will make YOUR life better", the Democrats can sweep the board.
So please let's set this "common good" nonsense aside.
I don't even really have the time or room for my second major issue with Tomasky, which is his trouble with Democrats who come in flavors other than vanilla. And yes, I mean it just that way. So look for Part 2 of my review, "Revenge of the Minorities", when I get the chance to write it.
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